Sibling suns – made famous in the "Star Wars" scene where Luke Skywalker gazes toward a double sunset – and the planets around them may be more common than we've thought, and Cornell astronomers are presenting new ideas ...

Sharp images obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope confirm that three supernovae discovered several years ago exploded in the dark emptiness of intergalactic space, having been flung from their home galaxies millions or ...

Viewed from above, our solar system's planetary orbits around the sun resemble rings around a bulls-eye. Each planet, including Earth, keeps to a roughly circular path, always maintaining the same distance from the sun.

For a planet, this would be like a day at the spa. After years of growing old, a massive planet could, in theory, brighten up with a radiant, youthful glow. Rejuvenated planets, as they are nicknamed, are only hypothetical. ...

NOAO scientists, using the Gemini Observatory 8-meter telescope in Chile, have obtained the highest resolution image ever obtained for the planetary nebula NGC 2346. Shaped like a butterfly, or an hourglass, but known scientifically ...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered an immense cloud of hydrogen dubbed "The Behemoth" bleeding from a planet orbiting a nearby star. The enormous, comet-like feature is about 50 times the size ...

Using the robotic Liverpool Telescope, an international team of scientists has found what looks like the best pre-explosion candidate yet for a 'type 1a' supernova, where a massive and extremely dense star in the Andromeda ...

Starship

A starship is a theoretical spacecraft designed for traveling between the stars, as opposed to a vehicle designed for orbital spaceflight or interplanetary travel.

The term is mostly found in science fiction, as humanity has not yet constructed such vehicles (while the Voyager and Pioneer probes have traveled into local interstellar space, they are not generally considered starships, mainly because they are both unpowered and unmanned). However, exploratory engineering has been undertaken on several preliminary designs and feasibility studies for starships that could be built with modern technology or technology thought likely to be available in the near future. For examples of such studies, see Project Daedalus, Project Orion, and Project Longshot.